A promoted tweet from Audi showed up on my Twitter timeline today, and the url stood out to me. In the tweet, Audi referenced Progress.Audi. Not only is Audi promoting a domain name using its .Audi extension, but the automaker is also using Progress.Audi for a standalone website:
The freedom to imagine a new way forward. Buckle up, a new era is coming. #FutureIsAnAttitude #AudiSkysphereConcept
— Audi USA (@Audi) August 3, 2021
You will note that Audi chose to not include http:// or www. within the url. Clicking through the link in the tweet brings visitors to the Progress.Audi website. On the Progress.Audi website, the headline reads, “The world premiere of the Audi skysphere concept on August 10.” Also notably, many of the internal links related to the skysphere concept on the website lead to pages within the Progress.Audi website. This indicates that Audi isn’t simply using this as a tracking splash page.
From what I can tell using nTLDStats.com, it looks like Audi has a little more than 1,800 registered .Audi domain names. Some of these domain names are being used – like Stuttgart.Audi and A4.Audi, and others are used for forwarding – like A7.Audi and R8.Audi. The company has been slowly increasing the number of .Audi domain names that are registered.
I presume there will be a day, some day in the future, where seeing a .brand domain name in usage is not an uncommon thing. For now, it catches my attention when I see one being used.
